Ambition is a poor excuse for not having enough common sense to be lazy. Being lazy is one of the most underrated, misunderstood forms of human existence. It may also be a more healthful way of life than performing high-energy activities. Dr. Peter Axt, a professor of health science at Fulda University near Frankfurt, has recently written a book titled THE JOY OF LAZINESS...

Monday, January 17, 2022, is Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, the third Monday in January of each year. In 1955, at age 26, Martin Luther King, Jr. was thrust into civil-rights leadership in Montgomery, Alabama, after Rosa Parks had made her courageous stand not to move to the back of the bus...

Bob Brewer was born and raised in western Arkansas. As a youngster, his great-uncle introduced him to a mystery that included wilderness paths, hidden symbols, carvings on trees and rocks, and the topography of certain areas. The old man was the keeper of some sort of secret knowledge that he kept to himself...

When I was about five years old, I was excited to learn that Santa Claus was going to appear at my house early on Christmas Eve to personally hand Christmas gifts to my little brother and me. My parents explained that Santa was doing this as a special treat for us since we didn't have a chimney...

There are two kinds of adventurers -- those who go hoping to find adventure and those who go secretly hoping they won’t On July 17, 1930, two high school buddies from Minneapolis, Eric Sevareid and Walter Port, boarded their canoe on the Mississippi River, near Minneapolis, and headed south. Soon, they turned right on the Minnesota River and traveled north-northwest, all the way to Big Stone Lake in South Dakota, the source of the river...

The Lakota Sioux are a nation of Native Americans who roamed the northern plains in and around the Black Hills of South Dakota. They have a prophecy known as the White Buffalo Calf Woman. According to the prophecy, two warriors were out hunting buffalo, approximately 2,000 years ago, when they spotted a white buffalo calf. As they approached the calf, it turned into a beautiful young Indian girl...

ROLLERBALL was a futuristic movie made in 1975 that had multiple layers of deep meaning far beyond the brutal sport it portrayed. It depicted a future, supposedly the year 2018 AD, in which global corporations rule the world. Countries no longer exist and the sport of Rollerball was designed by the corporations to defeat individuality...

Apparently, there's a secret that has been floating around throughout the ages and discovered by a select few people, such as Aristotle, Plato, Isaac Newton, Albert Einstein, Martin Luther King, Carl Jung, Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, Winston Churchill and others. These great people of history were "past secret teachers."...

In 1980, when I was married and living in Los Angeles, my wife and I took a trip to Club Med in Playa Blanca, Mexico. We boarded a 707 passenger jet, chartered by a travel agency, on a Friday night bound for Manzanillo. To my surprise, the plane landed in La Paz on the Baja Peninsula where each passenger was given a card by the stewardess and told to fill it out. ...

Russell Means (1939 - 2012) was an Oglala Sioux from South Dakota. He perished from Mother Earth on October 22, 2012. He was an outspoken advocate for the rights of indigenous people in North and South America. He also appeared in many Hollywood films, and was active in the Libertarian party as a nominee to represent the party as a presidential candidate in 1987, coming in second to Congressman Ron Paul...

We live in a world of rules made by men in suits and neckties. Free-spirited weirdoes have difficulty coping with the nonsense of conformity and have an overwhelming desire for self-expression -- the weirder the better. Some thousand years ago, ancient Druids (Celtic paganism) practiced human sacrifice to please their gods. They created giant effigies out of wood, called "Wicker Man," with criminals trapped inside, and set them ablaze...

In the late 1970s, I was a fool. I married the wrong woman and worked hard to get ahead. In the early 1980s, I regained my sanity. I divorced my wife and escaped the rat race. I owned a house, with a pool, before the marriage. After the divorce, my ex-wife owned a house and I had peace of mind...

I lived in the Los Angeles area for 11.5 years (1975-1986), where I also moved a dozen times within the area for various reasons, including a 5-year marriage and subsequent divorce. I particularly liked the village of Topanga, in the hills between the San Fernando Valley and the ocean, above Malibu, and lived in 3 different locations in those hills...

Many years ago, a bolt of lightning struck an oak tree in my parent's yard, about 20 feet outside the window where my mother was standing at the time. She told me it was very loud and the whole room became a bright pink. A neighbor across the street witnessed the strike. There was an explosion, followed by a gigantic ball of fire, followed by a huge puff of smoke. The tree was totally destroyed, scattered into pieces across the entire front yard...

A hero is someone who understands the responsibility of this existence and reacts accordingly. Pamela Murphy died on April 8, 2010, at age 90. She had spent 35 years as a patient liaison at the Sepulveda Veterans Administration in southern California, where she gave special treatment to every soldier under her care. ...

Many strange artifacts have been discovered over the years that don't conform to the current theories of the history of man. An educational website called "About, Inc." lists the 10 most puzzling ancient artifacts. 1) The Grooved Spheres...

When I first moved into my current abode in the Land of Ark, many moons ago, I had my parents over for a barbecue. During the evening, a light bulb in the kitchen burned out. I stood on a wobbly stool that my dad was clutching to keep steady. I unscrewed the dead light bulb, passed it down to my mother who then handed me another light bulb which I then secured into place...

Ocean voyages tended to be melancholy undertakings in ancient times. In 1830, the captain of a British naval survey ship, the HMS Beagle, put a bullet in his head during a period of intense gloom. The following year, Robert FitzRoy, a 23-year-old gentleman of nobility, was given command of the vessel and assigned the formal task of charting coastal waters...

In 1970, a U.S. Athena missile was fired from a location in Utah, scheduled to land in the White Sands Missile Base in New Mexico. However, it went about 900 miles off course, without apparent explanation, and crashed in the Sonora Desert in Mexico, over a hundred miles south of the Big Bend area in Texas...

"The world is incomprehensible, thus we must treat the world as it is -- a sheer mystery." Carlos Castaneda The Dogon is a small African tribe in the southwest corner of the Sahara Desert. A thousand years ago, the Dogon collectively refused to convert to Islam. Thereafter, Islamic law classified the Dogon, as well as other groups in the region, as being fair game for slavery, which included the murder of the males and enslavement of the women and children...